


Closer to Fine

by Tintinnabulation_of_the_Bells



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Cassandra Cain is Black Bat, Damian Wayne is Robin, Dick Grayson Tries to Be a Good Older Sibling, Dick Grayson is Nightwing, Gen, Hurt Jason Todd, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Jason Todd Needs A Hug, Jason Todd is Red Hood, Major Character Injury, Tim Drake is Red Robin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:00:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25631701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tintinnabulation_of_the_Bells/pseuds/Tintinnabulation_of_the_Bells
Summary: Since his resurrection, Jason's used to dealing with injuries on his own, and the memories his prior life don't offer much of a roadway to accepting help either. When a mission goes south, he comes to realize that things can become, if not perfect, then at least a little easier than before.
Relationships: Cassandra Cain & Jason Todd, Dick Grayson & Jason Todd, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Tim Drake & Dick Grayson & Jason Todd & Damian Wayne
Comments: 19
Kudos: 365





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by a comic (link below) from the lovely Doctopher/doc-squash on tumblr. Some dialogue is taken from the artwork with permission, even if the story is a little angstier than the original.
> 
> Comic: https://doc-squash.tumblr.com/post/623995018574692352/bruce-have-you-signed-the-dnr-i-sent-you-its

Perhaps it was a foolish dream, but Jason had hoped that dealing with injuries (like breaking his leg a fourth time) would be, if not pleasant, then at least easier than before. He first broke his leg at age seven, and the memory of his mother holding his hand and whispering to him as Dr. Thompkins set the bone was bittersweet; for a time, she doted on him, and even Willis drew the line at smacking around a young boy with a broken leg, so the beatings eased until they removed the cast. Then after four weeks, she’d refilled his prescription for her own purposes, furthering her descent into the addiction spiral, and the guilt gnawed at his insides more than the pain ever did.

The second time he broke his leg, he did so as Robin. One bad landing was all it took for the bone to snap just above the ankle, and much to his preteen-self’s dismay, the pain and frustration forced tears from his eyes as he dragged himself down the alley, tossing batarangs at the three thugs attacking Batman because his stupid mistake precluded him from any real useful action. He knew then that Bruce wouldn’t be mad, wouldn’t hurt him further (that particular fear receded around six months into his tenure at the manor), but Batman would be disappointed in Robin. Once Batman dispatched with the criminals, he took one look at Jason before swooping him into his arms and carrying him all the way to Leslie’s. The break hurt more that time, or at least the memory of the pain resonated more sharply in his brain, but at least he’d had a warm bed to return to and Alfred’s soup to wash down the medication. Dick even visited for a day and he let Jason choose any movie he wished from the manor’s impressive (excessive, even) DVD collection. At the time, it was almost a fond memory, but his death and everything following had tainted it irreparably.

The third time, the break in his leg barely registered amidst the agony thrumming throughout the rest of the body. When the Joker slammed the crowbar into his shin, he howled in shock, but another whack to the head stunned him into silence only moments later. There had been no recovery period then, because twenty minutes later, he lay a smoldering corpse amidst the rubble of a warehouse in Ethiopia. Any lingering effects, like so many of his other injuries, vanished in the green waters of the Lazarus Pit and the haze a different type of torment than he’d ever imagined before, the kind which seethed in the membrane between his mind and his skull.

He'd moved forward from that anger, most days at least. On days when it flared in his gut and his chest, he channeled it into the hard, gritty work of cleaning up Gotham. On the worst nights, he liked to blow things up.

Tonight, he carried several pounds of C4 into a warehouse.

Said warehouse officially belonged to a China-based shipping company, but practically speaking, Ian McDermott ran the show. McDermott was the worst kind of criminal, motivated by not only money but by his own twisted pride. For a long time, he smuggled in more ordinary cargo, things not available in the US or only purchased with a heavy import tax, but in the past year he’d escalated. First to drugs, and now to children, and Jason would be damned if he allowed a single child to leave the docks under his watch. This warehouse contained a huge proportion of their drug stash, and blowing it up would cripple their operation financially, or at least sever the relationship between them and several of their international clients. He’d planned a separate infiltration two days later to rescue the children before they were shipped out. He wanted backup for that mission, and he’d recruited Nightwing who would be in town for the job by then.

Several guards patrolled the main warehouse entrance, but no one watched the roof. He was no Dick Grayson, but he could scale a wall better than most, particularly when he’d already taken the time to notch grips into the concrete several days earlier. The climb was easy enough, and after unscrewing the grate to the vent at the far left of the roof, he used his grapple to descend easily into the warehouse.

As expected, he found the interior empty save for the stacks of shipping crates, each containing “bars of soap” that were actually bricks of cocaine. Clever, if a little overdone. With all the care of a mother settling down her newborn in the crib, he nestled the C4 from his pack into the crevices between the crates. After finalizing their positions, he set the incendiary device on its countdown and headed back to the still-hanging grapple cable. He double checked his inventory, and finding it satisfactory, prepared to shoot up again to the roof, where he would make a swift and timely exit before the whole building imploded. In an out, efficiency that even Bruce would have admired, even if he would have disliked the exact methods more.

He'd nearly finished clipping himself in when he heard it: a faint cry, desolate and high pitched, nothing like the voice of any adult man would be guarding the warehouse. Furthermore, it seemed to be coming from inside, perhaps from within one of the little offices at the back edge of the warehouse.

Glancing at the timer, he assessed the situation quickly in his head. He left enough time for a quick—but not rushed—escape. If he hurried, he could peek in and out and still leave more than enough time for a fast exit. He followed the voice as it continued to wail. It definitely belonged to a child. Jason’s heart fluttered—they never kept children in this warehouse before, and there’d been no sign of them when he dropped by for a last check in only yesterday. If they’d moved some of the children in here…

When he opened the door to the last office off the balcony, the sight before him was confusing. There was indeed a child—a boy, no more than seven or eight years old—but he wasn’t bound or restrained in any way. In fact, the cause for his crying appeared to be action figure he’d just broken. The head of a tiny Tarzan lay several inches away from the body, painted eyes staring ghoulishly at the still intact figure of Jane clutched in the boy’s hands. A crate ensconced in the corner of the room contained several other action figures and building blocks as well as a package of granola bars.

This kid was no captive. No, in all likelihood, one of these psychos had decided drug smuggler was the perfect occupation for “bring your child to work day.” The kid ceased crying as he laid eyes on Jason, and his gaze widened as he recognized the mask shielding Jason’s face. He stared up at him without terror, without hesitation, and Jason cursed every father who ever entangled their children in troubles far beyond their control. He’d designed the explosion such that the warehouse would collapse inwards, sparing the lives of the men outside while destroying everything within. No person, let alone a child, would survive inside.

Jason hated what he had to do with every fiber of his being, but he’d done things he hated far more. He clapped his hand over the boy’s mouth. “I need to get you out of here,” he whispered.

The boy froze, then whimpered, and Jason hated himself even more. They didn’t have time to explain, however. He tore off a strip of cloth from his shirt and tied it around the kid’s mouth, forming a gag. The moment he could, he would take it off, but he couldn’t afford drawing more people inside the warehouse with the kid’s cries.

“You’re safe,” he whispered. “Please just trust me, I just need to get you outside.”

Whether out of understanding or fear, the kid did not resist as Jason pick him up and pressed him against his shoulder. He descended the stair as quickly as he could and fumbled with the clip on the grapple wire one-handed. The timer ticked away, making no physical noise, but Jason heard each click in his mind. They shot up towards the roof, where Jason made a quick decision about how to proceed. He couldn’t climb back down or jump, not with the boy, so he latched the edge of the grapple onto the edge of the building and rappelled down, kicking off against the wall.

They landed with a thud, and Jason tugged at the grapple only to find it sticking to the top of the roof. Shit. It must have snagged on a crack in the concrete. He tugged again, twice, three times before abandoning it entirely. They needed to run.

If they were going to run, he needed to let the kid breathe properly. But suddenly, the kid screamed beneath the gag, and Jason’s muffling hand came down seconds too late. Shouts echoed from the other side of the warehouse, and Jason knew that if he wanted to escape with no casualties, he would need to draw them away from the center of the explosion. And despite what people thought of him, he didn’t usually try to kill people who were low-level enforcers. He reserved that form of justice for the worst of the bunch.

He tugged the gag down, pulling it below the kid’s neck. “I need you to run as fast as you can as far away as you can. Run in the opposite direction from me and don’t stop. Find a police officer, a security officer, okay?”

“My daddy,” whined the kid, and regret and urgency tugged at his heart with equal force.

“You’ll see your daddy soon, but to do that, I need you to run, okay?”

He practically shoved the kid away, and to his relief, the boy obeyed his instructions. He watched as the boy ran for several seconds before turning around the face the men whose footsteps clattered across asphalt as they rounded the corner of the warehouse. Three men in total stepped into his eyeline, each with their own weapons. Jason pulled out two of his pistols and flipped on his voice modulator.

“You all need to get out of here,” he yelled in his artificially-gravelly voice. “Get out of here if you want to live?”

One of the men fired his gun, and the bullet missed Jason’s arm by half a foot. They weren’t snipers, but a shot like that from thirty yards away indicated they weren’t amateurs either. It was time to get serious.

He sprinted towards the wharf, firing indiscriminate bullets behind him as he ran; they weren’t meant to hit the marks, just to deter them. Nevertheless, the men pursued, firing their own rounds. One bullet grazed his bicep, leaving a burning trail in its wake. He ran on, but he knew he needed to turn away to keep them from getting too close to the boy, where a stray bullet could easily take down the kid. He swerved and zig-zagged as he ran, and he was still intact as he slipped around the corner so that he was running between the warehouse and the docks and –

The world went white.

He heard the explosion a split-second before it hit him, but then the force of it propelled him forward until he slammed against something hard and unforgiving knee first. The collision slowed his momentum and twisted him around until he skidded across the docks and tipped right over the edge into the harbor.

For a moment, he sank, completely stunned and forced down by the weight of his gear. Then, regaining a modicum of awareness, he tried to kick forward, but the agony radiating from his leg forced a reflexive inhale brough water into his lungs. The explosion must have damaged his helmet and the filtration system. He couldn’t decide which hurt more, his lungs or his leg, but either way, if he didn’t push past, he was going to drown. He hadn’t come all this way only to die in another warehouse explosion, this one of his own design. The salt water chilled him—Gotham Aprils were still frigid, at least in the ocean—which presented a double-edged sword. The cold brought numbness which dulled the pain, at least in his leg, but it only slowed his already sluggish movements.

He kicked towards what he thought was the surface using his one good leg. If it wasn’t the surface, he would almost certainly die. The helmet protected him from the sting of saltwater, but his vision still blurred as he focused on what seemed to be a light ahead of him. Everything hurt—even moving his arms strained his chest, and his lungs begged for oxygen as he forced his body upwards.

Breaking through the water was like being reborn—again. He coughed, sputtered and gasped, his body both seeking to gain air and to expel water while doing neither especially well. He flapped his arms to keep afloat while moving his bad leg as little possible, but quickly realized that was hardly a sustainable solution. No one should tread water with what he assumed had to be a broken leg. He swiveled around, trying to gain a sense of his bearings, and the best solution he saw involved a thirty-foot swim to one of the concrete pillars supporting the jutting lip of the wharf; at least he could use it for support while he brainstormed a long-term plan.

The short swim taught him a whole new lesson in torture, which was impressive given his extensive background in various ways to kill people. He couldn’t move his leg at all without inciting a fresh burst of misery along the limb. He tried to recall the previous times he’d broken his leg, if it hurt this badly. When he searched his memories, he found only fraught emotion and glimpses of conflicting pain and comfort, nothing simple enough to serve as a comparison. Any broken limb hurt, but he had a feeling he’d really fucked up his knee this time. Every jolt of the water seemed to move the lower half of his leg separately from the upper half, which was as nauseating as it was painful. It reminded him of his previous warehouse explosion, where half of his bones seemed disconnected from their joints and he’d needed to drag his body across the floor for even a scant chance of survival. And just like last time, he was utterly alone.

He nearly cried in relief as he reached the pillar and wrapped his arms around the pole to steady himself. His chest still heaved for air and liquid sloshed uncomfortably in his stomach; if he made it out of the situation, he’d probably catch pneumonia or the like, knowing his luck. His heart raced, far too fast to be healthy. For a minute, he just breathed, and slowly, his pulse eased its frenetic pace and returned to a steadier, albeit imperfect one. He shivered, from cold or adrenaline or shock, and the motion hurt his entire body. Still, he kept himself quiet as he listened for any indication that the men above were searching for him. His ears found the crackle of smoldering buildings and the gentle rush of the ocean, nothing more.

An assessment of his surroundings revealed little of use beyond the pillar and others like it. If a ladder back to the docks existed, the night obscured it from view. Debris from the warehouse drifted by, all of it scrap metal or wood. Under better circumstances, he could have explored the edge of the wharf until his fingers met a ladder or other handhold he could use to haul himself up. Under these circumstances, he’d be lucky if he didn’t drown five minutes in.

He needed help, and he needed it quickly. If those men weren’t too injured to search for him, he wouldn’t last through another encounter with them.

A quick tap of his comms revealed that something—the explosion, the water—had fried the circuitry. That left him with his distress beacon. His fingers twitched as they hovered over the button on the inside of his helmet; the beacon was more resilient, but all it did was indicate distress. He couldn’t control who among the family received it, nor provide them with information about the situation. What if Tim or Damian showed up to help him? Both would be insufferable.

In the end he pressed the button, if only because he was concerned his finger would become too numb for him to do that if he waited much longer.

And wait he did. The frigid water lapped over his body and he clutched to the pillar. His frozen fingers fumbled more than once with their grip, and twice the strength of a cough nearly dislodged him entirely. He couldn’t feel his leg at all anymore, which was good because it hurt less, but bad because maybe he’d screwed up his circulation and they’d just cut the damn thing off. Time either inched onward at the pace of a garden or jolted forward in discombobulated fits and starts; either way, he couldn’t tell you how long he waited there. Nor at what point he began to doubt anyone was coming.

He jolted awake at one point, unaware he’d begun to drift off. He hoped the boy made it to safety. If the boy died, then he’d failed, not only in the mission but in life as well. He tried to imagine the kid safe in the warm embrace of his mother. In his mind, his mother was a tall, black-haired woman with the same hazel eyes as the kid. She wrapped her arms around him, and when she promised to take him far away from fathers who didn’t care, she meant it. The next day, the two of them ran off to California, or Florida. Somewhere warmer. Somewhere better than Gotham, even if they only had each other.

Come to think of it, she did look a lot like Catherine, or at least Catherine as he liked to remember her.

“Hood!”

He jerked and nearly dented his helmet against the pole. He needed to work harder at keeping lucid if he was imagining voices. The cold ate away at his clarity, sending him back into a fog.

“Hood! Jason!”

Wait, that was his name. The voice was calling for him. Was it his mother? Death itself? Damian once asked him if he remembered his death. Not dying but _being_ dead. All in all, it was actually one of the kid’s more polite, sincere questions, and he’d responded truthfully enough. No, he carried no memory of the time between the warehouse and waking up in that godforsaken coffin. Which isn’t to say that he hadn’t been somewhere or seen someone. As someone who’d been mysteriously resurrected and then dunked in the Lazarus pit, he’d be stupid to assume that nothing existed after life. Still, the notion of Death as an anthropomorphized or personified being never sat well with Jason—a grim reaper was far too clean for all the messiness that followed.

Someone called his name again, and before he could think about responding, a splash off to his left startled him. Icy water splashed against his neck, and the surprise forced his numb fingers to relinquish their hold. He sank, was sinking again, or at least he would have been if it weren’t for the strange arms lifting upward then thrusting him towards the sky. Strong hands gripped his forearm and _pulled_ , yanking a yelp from his lips as feeling in his leg surged to life. The yelp escalated into a scream as someone turned him on his back and moved his calf.

“M’l’g,” he gasped, forcing sounds through unfeeling lips. Whoever was holding him needed to know, unless their intention was to hurt him more, in which case it didn't really matter either way.

Someone swore, maybe him, maybe the person attached to the hands now palpating the skin around his knee and setting his bones on fire.

As he stared up at the smoggy, Gotham night, a vision of a boy, black-haired and hazel eyed, danced through the clouds. The kid. The one he’d risked everything for.

“Thr’ w’s k’d,” he said. “’kay?”

A face blocked out his view of the smog. It looked a lot like Bruce.

“Jason,” said the face, and no, it couldn’t be Bruce, because Bruce never allowed such unfiltered panic into his voice. Not over Jason, anyways. Dick, sure, Damian often, but never him. Still, whoever it was needed to know about the boy.

“Fin’ t’ k’d,” he insisted. His urgency triggered a coughing bout, and the coughing forced water to his lips that quickly changed to bile and vomit as his body tried to expel the sea water he’d swallowed. Someone turned him again, this time onto his side, and he lacked even the energy to whimper. When the hands moved him again, he saw a face, a different one. This one had black hair like his mother, but it was not his mother. Her skin was too tan, her cheeks too full, gaze too intense. She wasn’t his mother, and yet he wanted so, so badly for her to be.

“Mom?” he asked, and that was the last thing he remembered before the black of the sky swallowed everything else into its gaping maw, leaving him with nothing left at all.


	2. Chapter 2

He awoke to a full-body shiver and an intense, deep, full-body ache. When he shifted his arms, what felt like wool scraped against his skin. Huh. At least he could feel his skin. When he breathed, the air hit something solid before bouncing back against his mouth. Turning his head to the side drained nearly all of his reserves, but when he spotted the figure curled in a plastic chair less than yard away, dozing peacefully, he was glad he’d moved.

As if sensing his gaze, Cass opened her eyes and stirred and stretched, all the while keeping her eyes fixed on Jason. He opened his mouth to speak, but Cass lifted her index finger to her lips, a clear sign that he should remain quiet. He obeyed without hesitation, but tried to convey his question with his furrowed brow and quizzical eyes.

“Hospital,” she said. “Not cave.”

Oh. That was…well, it wasn’t really one thing or the other. Sometimes he hated the cave, especially when he woke up and the ceiling stretched too high, all of the sounds came at him too heightened as they echoed off the walls. Sometimes he heard Bruce’s voice and forgot the past five years.

But a hospital—specifically a hospital and not Leslie’s clinic—meant things were bad. Even his tired brain understood the implications. Especially for someone like him without a proper legal identity, hospitals always carried greater risk. For him to be in one, the danger of staying away must have outweighed the not inconsiderable risk of admission.

Another shiver wracked his body, and the ache narrowed its focus, gathering strength in the process. Each wheeze for air pulled at a band stretched around his chest, and in between the pain from his leg was enough to suck his breath away. He flopped his head back to his earlier position, and his vision whited out.

Cass’ fingers brushed against his arm. “Warm first,” she said. “Then operation.”

Fifteen other questions burgeoned at the tip of his tongue, but he found his eyes stubbornly refusing to open. His hearing and his consciousness soon followed suit.

He awoke to a sharp pain, one concentrated on the plane of his shin just below the knee. As best he could tell, no one had moved or even touched the limb. No, it did that all on its own. A soft keening filled the air, and several seconds passed before he realized the sound was coming from him.

A touch across his forehead surprised him into silence. Large, calloused fingers swept his bangs off his forehead, and a thumb rubbed at his temple. The action did little to assuage his pain, but the contact comforted him nonetheless.

“I’ve called in a nurse,” said a voice, one both familiar and unexpected. “You’re only a few hours out from surgery, but they should be able to give you something for the pain.”

He coughed weakly. He remembered his chest hurting before, but he couldn’t remember why. Broken ribs brought sharper, localized pain, while this ache was diffuse. The same calloused fingers from his forehead moved down to Jason’s hand where they squeezed gently.

“Sleep if you can, Jason,” the voice said, and the rumble travelled through his whole body, not unlike the purr of a cat. “Someone will be here when you wake up.”

And if only because there was nothing else he could do, he obeyed and drifted back into unconsciousness.

He awoke to someone humming the M.A.S.H. theme song. A quick rundown of his body revealed the pain to be a little more muted than before, though still lurking shallowly beneath the veneer of painkillers. His breaths came easier too, even if the scratchiness of his throat indicated he’d been coughing repeatedly. Best of all, he was able to think clearly enough to perform the assessment, even if a fuzzy aftertaste accompanied his thoughts.

Still, he could think enough to identify the person humming. Only one person in his life liked M.A.S.H., and he’d spent several sick days as a kid watching the show, trying to fall asleep as Dick murmured the lines under his breath. Dick claimed he only knew the show so well because it was one of the few shows he’d been able to watch as a child through reruns and a fellow acrobat’s VHS box set, but Jason knew he still watched it from time to time whenever melancholy took over after a bad case.

“Do you ever…shut up?” he whispered. The weakness of his voice hampered the intended bite of his tone.

“Jason!” chirped Dick brightly. Something screeched against tile floor. “You’re awake!”

“Either that…or I’m in hell.”

He heard Dick’s frown, and sighed. He peeled his eyes open and blinked away the sleep dust only to focus on Dick’s face hovering inches away from him. His face was indeed screwed up in consternation, but as he caught Jason’s eye, a smile returned.

Jason quirked an eyebrow upward—he wasn’t really sure about movement beyond that for the moment. “Thought you weren’t coming in until Thursday,” he mumbled.

Dick pulled back, rattled around a plastic cup for a moment and then popped an ice chip in Jason’s mouth before he could think to protest. The ice began to melt as Dick spoke.

“It is Friday. Friday evening actually. I arrived late Wednesday night and was here for the transfer.”

Transfer? Jason shook himself awake and forced his eyes to focus as he scanned the room. He barely recalled his last few forays into lucidity, but he supposed the color of the walls had changed.

He swallowed the last of the ice. “Where—

“Leslie’s clinic,” said Dick. “We moved you as soon as you’d stabilized enough. It’s easier to avoid questions that way, and the doctors at Gotham General trust her. Plus, you’re now officially her nephew twice removed or some such nonsense, so all the more reason for you to be in her care.”

“Nephew?”

“Yup,” Dick said, popping the p at the end. “We had to think of some identity for you, and Leslie does actually have a nephew of some sort who lives in Canada. You don’t look too different as it so happens. Bruce is taking care of the paperwork with the hospital, but like I said, the sooner we got you out, the fewer questions we’d have to answer.”

Dick’s response answered some of his questions (sort of, he’d need to talk to Leslie to get the full story), but a dozen more still remained, and he wasn’t sure how long he’d manage to stay awake, so he pressed forward. “Why was I in a hospital in the first place?’

Dick’s expression darkened. “I wasn’t there—Bruce and Cass rescued you the other night—but my understanding is that you were in rough shape. Hypothermia, blood loss, a chest infection, a bit of shock from the broken bones—plus, Leslie said you needed a proper orthopedic surgeon, more than just her and Alfred.”

For the first time since waking up, Jason tilted his chin downwards and gave himself a visual once over. The results were less than promising. A bulky, full-length soft brace encased his right leg, which lay elevated on a mound of pillows. He expected that much, along with the oxygen tubing tickling his nostrils and the wires poking out from his hospital gown. Less expected, however, was the sling holding his right arm against his chest and the IV port stuck into the juncture of his neck and collarbone. He lifted the arm experimentally and a small twinge ran through his upper arm. Oh, right, the bullet graze.

“Why do I need this?” he asked, jerking his chin towards the sling.

Dick, who’d already grimaced in sympathetic pain when Jason moved his arm, now looked like he was mildly constipated. Jason recognized it as an expression of frustration, usually sibling-induced.

“You were shot, Jason,” he said, as if incredulous at having to answer the question.

“It was a graze.”

“It was more than a graze,” said Dick, eyes narrowing. “I mean, as far as bullet wounds go, it wasn’t awful, just went through some muscle, but you were still bleeding pretty steadily when Bruce and Cass found you. Plus, it is a bullet wound. I don’t think a sling is excessive.” Jason opened his mouth to argue, and Dick shushed him. “Look, you’re not going to be moving much anyways for the next week or so, maybe more. So just don’t make a big deal out of it, okay? Everyone’s a little on edge. If it’s actually holding you back, we’ll reassess.”

Jason filed the argument away for later, hoping his still-woozy mind would retain the information. He blamed the haziness for his slow reaction to the other nugget Dick had dropped in that last sentence. “Wait, you said not moving for a week?”

“Or more,” said Dick. He sighed and leaned back in chair while setting the ice chip cup down on the little nightstand. “I’m not gonna lie, Jay, you broke your leg pretty badly. Femur and tibia, right at the knee, plus some ligament damage to boot. They operated on you for five and a half hours yesterday once you’d warmed up enough and the swelling stabilized. You’ll have to talk to Leslie, but she told Bruce not to expect you out of bed until late next week, and definitely not until you’re off the oxygen.”

Jason let his head slide back against the pillow. Now that he’d been conscious for more than minute, he recognized the cracked ceiling, the smudged pain, the acrid scent of disinfectants fighting against the natural grime of the city. He’d woken up here before several times before, both pre- and post-Robin. The first time, he’d contracted a severe case of bronchitis. His mother, desperate and terrified with a small, sick boy, carried him into the clinic as he’d coughed and coughed. He’d only be six-years old at the time…

He jolted forward, and pain spiraled through him like an electric spark. His knee throbbed and his arm burned, but he needed to know, he needed to hear about the boy.

“Whoa, calm down,” said Dick, his eyes wide with alarm.

“The kid,” he said, wheezing as his lungs struggled to match his urgency. “There was a kid in the warehouse.”

From the confusion on Dick’s face, he knew nothing about the kid, which likely meant that Bruce and Cass hadn’t found him either.

“I thought you were dealing with the human trafficking later,” said Dick.

“I was,” he said, still fighting to control his breathing. It would be much, much later now, unless he could get someone else on the job. “He wasn’t being trafficked. I think he belonged to one of the men.”

Dick blanched. “All of the men we found there were sent to the hospital; a couple have already been released to prison, no bail. No one mentioned a son.”

“I’m going out there,” he said, and levered himself up with his good arm.

“Like hell you are,” said Dick, moving to push him back, but his actions were unnecessary. Jason’s arm collapsed, sending him crashing back to the pillow with a thud and a gasp. Black spots crept into his vision and a wet cough stretched the muscles around his lungs painfully. Even his shoulder was hurting, along with his head.

Dick rubbed his thumb across his arm as he jerked forward with each cough, and when at last the jag settled, he offered up another ice chip. Jason accepted it gratefully.

“I’ll have someone look into it, but it’s been nearly three days. If he hasn’t been found, he’ll be difficult to track down. For all we know, he could have made it out with his father. One of the men could have escaped.”

Jason grunted.

“How’re you feeling, Jay?” Dick asked. “You need me to get Leslie?”

“I’m fine, Dick,” he said dismissively, waving him away with a small flinch as even that motion strained his battered body. He knew Dick wouldn’t believe him, so he tossed in an iota of truth to appease Dick’s curiosity. “Just a bit of a headache. My chest hurts a little”

Dick frowned. “The chest pain is from the infection. The headache could be from the hypothermia. How does your leg feel?”

In truth, the pain from his leg was crescendoing to a level he could no longer ignore. He grunted. “Been better.”

Dick stood. “I’m getting Leslie.”

In the five minutes it took for Dick to retrieve Leslie, Jason’s status escalated from struggling to ignore his discomfort to struggling not to scream. He clenched his jaw and gnashed his teeth to keep silent, but when Leslie and Dick entered the room, startling him, he loosed a small moan.

Leslie added something to his IV without bothering to ask him how he felt. He supposed his demeanor made his condition quite apparent. A minute passed before the full effect of the medication permeated his bloodstream, and he melted back against the pillow, breathing heavily from the oxygen streaming into his nose.

He tilted his head to look at her properly; she seemed concerned, but far less distraught than Dick who looked as if he were five seconds away from dragging him back to Gotham General.

“Hey, Aunt Leslie,” he said, offering a crooked grin to ease the tension.

“Don’t let it get to your head,” she said.

“Too late,” he replied. “I always knew you liked me best.”

“I’d like you a lot more if you stopped showing up in mortal danger every month.” Now it was her turn to frown disapprovingly. “You cut it close this time. The hospital had you on a hemodialysis machine to warm you up—you might not have lived if you’d come here.”

He knew that, but her pronouncement still unnerved him, particularly the part about hemodialysis. He liked his blood inside his body, thank you very much.

He shifted beneath the weight of her and Dick’s naked worry. “Well, thanks for the help. Both there and here.”

“Well, you won’t be here for much longer. I’ve been discussing with Alfred, and we can arrange a transfer to the manor in—

“I’m not going there,” he interjected flatly.

Leslie blinked. “Where else would you go?”

“I have an apartment,” he said, more petulantly than intended. He didn’t mean to sound like a snot-nosed child insisting they were old enough to make their own decisions, but he heard a note of that sentiment nonetheless.

“Your apartment is on the third floor,” said Dick patiently, again as if addressing a child.

“I can use crutches,” he said. “Wouldn’t be my first time.”

“You really should be on bedrest for the next week,” said Leslie. “You’ll likely have chest pain and shortness of breath until then, and you’re at risk for pneumonia. Besides, the swelling alone in your knee will be prohibitive for a little while. The fractures to your tibia were unstable, and combined with the distal femur fracture, you have quite a bit of metal in your knee.”

“So I’ll pop some Advil.”

“Just go to the manor,” said Dick. “It’s not like you don’t come there to visit anyways.”

“This is different,” he said, and it was, even if he didn’t think he could properly explain why, at least not to Dick. Visiting the manor was one thing, especially after he and Bruce had maintained a tepid truce for the past year, but if he went there to recover, he would be trapped. Being in his old room while sick or injured transported him instantly back to his Robin days, made him feel smaller and weaker and less in control of his own life. Sure, his apartment didn’t have thirty bedrooms and an elevator and a small clinic’s worth of medical equipment—all of which would help, he knew—but he could control who came in. He could control the space. He wouldn’t be living in someone else’s home, in someone else’s life.

Dick opened his mouth to argue, but Jason fixed him with his most sincere, pleading gaze. “It’s not like I’m saying no to all help. You can still come by to check on me, like I know you’ll do anyways, but I just need to be…home.”

Dick turned to Leslie for support, but she regarded Jason with a hard, nigh-unreadable stare. At last, she said, “I can’t force you to go anywhere. If you go back to your apartment, I will keep you a day or two longer to ensure that your chest and leg are healing well, and there will be some strict instructions for you to follow.”

“Fine,” he said. “Whatever I need to do.” He knew he’d chafe at some of the instructions, but he could handle those inconveniences later.

“Bruce isn’t going to be happy,” sighed Dick sadly.

“He’s never happy,” said Jason. “Good thing you’re cheerful enough for the both of you, right, Dickie?”

Had Leslie not been there, he would have bet money on Dick Grayson tackling him—sick and injured as he was—to the floor and dragging him back to the manor himself. But even Dick had the smarts to acquiesce to the demands of Leslie Thompkins.

Dick was right: Bruce was decidedly unhappy, even a little angry. Fortunately for Jason, he rarely based decisions on Bruce’s emotional state, and nothing his adoptive father yelled at him was especially original. Even drugged and fighting back pain, he matched Bruce word for word, argument for argument, until eventually Leslie intervened to kick Bruce out of the clinic altogether. She would have evicted Jason out too if doing so wouldn’t have violated her own medical advice.

On Monday of the following week, he met Dick and Cass outside in his shiny new wheelchair. Part of Leslie’s stipulations included using the chair to navigate around the apartment for the first two weeks in order to keep his leg elevated at all times and to reduce the likelihood of him falling while alone. The rest of her demands—including several bottles of pills for pain and infection, a steroid inhaler for his breathing—sat in the duffle bag on the curb next to him. At least he was free of the sling, even if he couldn’t use his arm for anything more than light activity.

Cass signed her greeting to him while Dick grumbled once more about Jason’s plan to go to his apartment, even after they’d taken every precaution and planned for every contingency. Two weeks’ worth of Alfred’s cooking awaited him in his freezer, meaning he wouldn’t have to cook, and Dick had installed a chair in his shower so he could clean himself. Combined with Leslie’s promise to make weekly house calls, and even Bruce couldn’t convincingly argue that the setup wasn’t safe. Not that he hadn’t tried.

They conquered the first obstacle—the transfer from wheelchair to car—with relative grace. The second obstacle—ascending the two flights of stairs to his apartment—proved more challenging. Cass carried the wheelchair up first while Dick supported Jason as they climbed, step by laborious step. After the first flight, Jason resolved to actually follow Leslie’s orders and use the wheelchair; just keeping his leg below his waist made it throb and stretch taut like it was expanding beneath the brace. Halfway through the second flight, his chest tightened as well, a wheeze returning to his breath.

He collapsed in the wheelchair as soon as they finished the final step, and he didn’t even bother to bat away Dick’s hands as his brother helped settle him in the chair, lifting the leg rest and sliding a pillow between his spine and the back of the chair. He even let Dick wheel him into his apartment. The bump at the threshold drew a wince from him, and Cass regarded him suspiciously as he waved her off. He forced down some of Alfred’s soup while plastering on a fake smile in the hopes that he could convince Dick to leave. He took two puffs of inhaler, still smiling though the steroids tasted like ass.

At long last, Dick stood up and declared it was time to get Jason into bed, at which point he would leave. Cass would stay, but he didn’t mind Cass. She knew the value of silence, never bothering to fill the air with mindless chatter or expecting him to respond in kind. Plus he trusted her in a fight more than he trusted anyone besides Batman himself. The transfer to the bed involved a little more awkward stumbling than he anticipated, due only to his exhaustion of course, but finally, nearly a week later, he lay back in his own bed and pressed his face into his own pillows. Someone (presumably Alfred) had washed the sheets in his absence.

Dick chewed his lip as he lifted Jason’s leg onto a pillow. “Now are you sure—

“Yes,” he said. Dick glared at him, which he ignored as always. “I will be fine here. And even if I’m not, Cass is more than capable of dealing with everything, right?”

Cass nodded.

Dick rubbed the nape of his neck. “Right, well, you know that Bruce is coming by later, right?”

He knew, and he fully intended on feigning sleep the entire time. Baseline-level of emotional ineptitude aside, Bruce was _unbearable_ when any of them, but especially Jason, was hurt. His paranoia translated into smothering and he’d be lucky if they managed to avoid an unwarranted yet panicked call to Leslie when Jason so much as sneezed wrong.

Dick continued, “And I’ll be by in the morning, and you have Alfred’s phone number—

“I have all of your phone numbers, dipshit,” he interrupted once more. They’d already recited this litany three times today. “And if you want me to rest, like you keep telling me to do, some peace and quiet will go a long way.”

Dick was far too predictable and easy to guilt. After one last check to ensure that his meds and a bottle of water were all within arm’s reach, Dick left. Jason leaned back and sighed as the thud of the door shutting echoed throughout the apartment.

Cass smiled at him, hesitant and slow. “He cares. Loudly.”

Jason snorted and sank even further into his pillow. “Yeah, no shit.” He eyed the book set on his nightstand, the one he’d been reading before all this shit went down. He gestured at it vaguely. “You mind if I just read for a while? I’ve been surrounded all the time this past week, and I need a break.”

“I’m outside. Yell if you need.”

He lasted only twenty minutes before falling back asleep. He dreamed of the boy and his wide eyes as Jason pushed him away to run. A dark cloud of ash obscured him from view, and his cries were met with complete silence.

When he awoke more, he found Bruce watching over him from the shadows like an actual bat. His voice was hoarse as if he’d been screaming. The stronger medication at the clinic had kept the dreams at bay, but it appeared he would be facing his disastrous psyche head on now that he’d switched to lower doses that didn’t immediately knock him out. He ate dinner silently at the kitchen table before showering at a snail’s pace, at which point all energy he’d gained from napping had dissipated. The exhaustion on his face was real, and in a rare show of understanding, Bruce left him alone in his room to sleep. Maybe he did look that pathetically drained.

He woke again in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with a leg that felt like it was on fire once more. From the twisted sheets and stuttering of his heart, he’d had a nightmare. Again. He forced his trembling fingers turn on the lamp and then to unscrew the bottle of his pain meds before swallowing two of them dry, not caring if it had been exactly six hours since his last dose. It felt like someone was boring a hole into his knee with a dull drill bit. Oral meds always needed longer to sink in, so he practiced controlled breathing for nearly half an hour while ignoring the lingering pain in his chest from the deep breaths. Eventually, the agony receded enough to allow him to drift into a fitful doze. He awoke twice more before morning, each time with the memory of a fiery explosion blowing a small dark-haired boy to bits, followed by utter darkness and a suffocating pine box.

Alfred showed up at eight am sharp in place of Dick, who’d been called away to help on some other mission last night and had only just returned. Jason’s muscles had the consistency of rice pudding at that point, and he knew he was a pathetic sight as he struggled to sit himself up without aggravating his knee or his arm. Alfred clucked his tongue in disapproval but helped him through the motions without verbal rebuke. He left around eleven when he received a call from the manor and apologized for stepping out early, but it was an urgent matter. Jason promised that he would be fine, and that he would have shoved him out the door if he’d been physically capable of doing so.

He spent the rest of the day in persistent, abject misery. Leslie warned him about the difficulty of his recovery, but he hadn’t anticipated the nagging, awful ache which hovered permanently outside the reach of his medication. Short of injecting himself with his stash of morphine, there was little he could do, and he knew if he strayed from his regimen, they would cart him back to the clinic that evening. So he read the same sentence four times over in his book and he muffled his scream when his heel accidentally slammed into the ground as he moved himself from bed to wheelchair for one of his few bathroom trips.

Alfred returned later for dinner, at which point he lacked the energy to keep up a façade. He gave one-word answers to Alfred’s questions and nearly snapped when Alfred asked him if needed assistance getting back into bed.

“Sorry Alf,” he whispered.

Alfred just shook his head. “I know it’s hard to be at your best in this state, my boy. I do wish you felt comfortable enough to stay at the manor, even if I understand why you might not. It is difficult to recover by oneself.”

Jason’s face burned and he mumbled something indistinct. Alfred had the graciousness not to ask more of him. After Alfred left, he spent the night much the same as the first, startling awake four times and unable to keep the pain or the nightmares at bay.

He gave up on proper sleep early in the morning, instead parking his wheelchair in front of the TV in his living room. Normally he didn’t use the TV much, but he couldn’t concentrate well enough to read and if nothing else the noise would be a distraction. He settled on M.A.S.H. in the end—Dick would have crowed in delight.

Even the noise of the TV couldn’t drown out the voices echoing up the stairwell though. Especially not ones which were so distinctive and so very, very loud.

“Why are we at Jason’s apartment?” whined a familiar voice in an oddly formal, accented voice. Damian? Jason straightened up as much as possible in his wheelchair.

“Jay broke his leg last week,” said another voice, this one belonging to Dick. “I told you earlier.”

“Oh, we’re here to say goodbye.” Damian again. “I won’t miss him, to be honest.”

Jason was going to murder the brat. He wasn’t some horse to be put down because of a lame leg.

“What? No!” Dick sounded suitably frustrated with the kid. “I just figured he could use some company.”

“Hello? Gotham Memorial? It’s Tim.” A third voice, this one mocking and obviously belonging to Tim. All three were nearly at the landing, based on the volume. “I need to buy a casket. Yeah, yeah, for him again.”

Something clattered against the floor, followed by a yelp from Tim. “That was my phone, Dick!”

“You don’t joke about things like that,” said Dick. “You have a second phone anyways.”

“It’s a work phone,” said Tim. They were just outside his apartment door. “Besides, it’s good to be prepared. I should ask Bruce if he has a DNR form.” What ensued sounded like a small tussle that Dick won, because Tim finally said. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be on my best behavior.”

One of the knocked at the door. “Jason,” said Dick’s voice. “I’ve brought Tim and Damian.”

As if the entire neighborhood hadn’t heard them approaching.

“Come in,” he said tiredly, resigned to his fate. He muted the TV. If he played it right, he could get them to leave within half an hour.

He rotated his chair just in time to see Damian march through the door first, a silver balloon clutched in his small hand. Damian’s eyes narrowed. “You look terrible, Todd. Maybe I was right to say goodbye.”

“Dami,” said Dick sharply.

Jason crossed his arms deliberately. “You try breaking your leg in four places, see if you come out pageant-ready.”

“I would never be so careless,” Damian said haughtily, and Tim snorted from right behind him. “Perhaps you would, Drake. You’re even worse than he is.”

Tim began to argue but Dick cut them all off with a purposeful, loud “Hi, Jay. How are you feeling?”

“Peachy,” he said, then raised his eyebrows as if to say, _Seriously? You brought the clown car?_ Dick looked mildly abashed.

Tim rattled a paper bag over Damian’s head. “We brought chili dogs. I know you have food, but you might want to eat these soon. They, uh, they didn’t travel super well.”

He rolled his eyes. “Stick ‘em in the fridge. I’ll have them for lunch.”

Tim disappeared into the kitchen. Dick nudged Damian forward, muttering, “The balloon, Dami.”

Damian sighed, then approached Jason with the balloon in his outstretched hand. “Here, Todd. I am sure this waste of helium will do wonders for your health.”

Jason studied the balloon. While the letters had clearly once read “Get Well Soon,” someone (presumably Damian) had crossed them out with sharpie and replaced them with a hastily written “R.I.P.”

Dick had just noticed the modification if his stormy expression was any indication. “What did you—just go help Tim in the kitchen.”

Damian scowled. “Drake hardly needs assistance.”

“Go,” said Dick harshly, and in a rare show of obedience, Damian skulked into the other room. Apparently, Dick’s authority over Damian from his time as Batman never fully faded.

Dick sighed. He looked nearly as exhausted as Jason felt. “Sorry about…this,” he said, gesturing vaguely. “How’s the leg?”

“Still broken, but I’m managing.” His answer clearly left Dick unsatisfied, so he added, “I mean, it hurts like a bitch, but it’s fine. Leslie said everything should start feeling a bit better next week.”

“Jesus, Jay,” said Dick as he plopped on the couch next to the wheelchair. Whatever he was going to say next was cut off by the sight on the television though. The commercial break had ended, and Hawkeyes face stared at them from the screen. “Glad to see you’ve come around.”

“I haven’t,” he said. “There’s not much on at 10 am on a Wednesday, and I’m not watching the news.”

Dick peered at him. “Are you sleeping okay? Damian was kinda right—you look awful.”

“Gee, thanks,” he said. “Just the usual, you know. The same old dreams about dying a fiery death. Say,” he added, changing the subject before Dick could pry further. “What’s the occasion for their visit?”

“They would have come earlier, but Damian was on a Titans mission, and Tim was with Kon and Cassie on special assignment as well. Bruce used an early spring break vacation as an excuse for the schools.”

Well that explained their absence earlier on. No that he’d missed them or needed them there, but often Bruce or Alfred would cart one of them along for a visit as part of their brotherly duties.

A loud crash from the kitchen had Dick on his feet again. “What is going on there?”

Tim poked his head around the door. “Damian tried to reach something, but he’s too short.”

“I am not _short_ , Drake. I’m nearly as tall as you.”

“Just come back before one of you ends up in the hospital,” said Dick wearily.

Jason watched as they walked into the room, searching for signs of damage. “If you broke something, you’re paying for it.”

“Tt,” said Damian. “If anything, you owe us, Todd. We found that boy you nearly got yourself blown up for.”

Jason shot upright. His leg protested, and he knew Dick noticed his grimace, but he didn’t care. “You found him?”

“Security footage at one of the other warehouses picked him up,” said Tim. “From there, we tracked him down to a temporary foster home. Turns out his mother died a couple of years back, and his father hadn’t been able to locate him after waking up in the hospital.”

Jason’s heart sank. “So, what, he’s back with the same dad who brough him to a drug warehouse?”

Tim rolled his eyes. “What, do you think we’re stupid? His father’s still in jail awaiting trial, and even if he weren’t, he basically forfeited custody by endangering his kid like that. No, we found a great-aunt who lives in Dover and she’s agreed to take him in.”

“We also located the other children,” added Damian. “The ones Dick said you were going to rescue. They are safe as well.”

Oh. That was…that was good. Very good, and entirely unexpected. Even though nothing physically had changed, his chest felt lighter and he breathed easily for the first time since the blast threw him into the harbor.

“That’s why I wasn’t here yesterday,” said Dick. “We were taking care of the situation.”

“I thought Bruce should adopt one of them,” mused Tim. “It would teach Damian how to share.”

Damian smacked Tim’s shoulder, and Tim pinched Damian’s arm, and Dick had to physically push them away from each other. “Enough!” he exclaimed. “Save it for the training mat, okay?”

Damian harrumphed while Tim glared, and Jason almost laughed aloud at the almost pouty expression on Damian’s face. “So what were you all planning on doing here anyways?” he asked. “Besides destroying my kitchen.”

Tim rummaged in the same paper bag which previously contained the chili dogs and pulled out a DVD with several chili stains on the cover. “Educating Damian. He’s never seen Star Wars, and it’s honestly a disgrace to be associated with him.”

“We’re just trying to help him assimilate at school,” amended Dick pointedly. “I know you like them too, Jay, so it’s a win-win. What do you say we get you onto the couch? It’ll be more comfortable.

Outnumbered three-to-one and at a significant physical disadvantage, he relented and allowed Dick to help him onto the couch cushions. Damian fetched a pillow from the bedroom to use for his leg, and Tim poured him a glass of water to go with his next dosage of medication. Dick settled next to Jason on the couch, and Jason refrained from saying anything when Damian tucked himself wordlessly beneath Dick’s arm on the other side. Tim inserted the DVD before taking the armchair and the remote.

As the medication wormed its way through his system, the tension from his body slackened and he sank deeper into the corner of the couch. The familiarity of the images and the words served as far better distractions than his earlier TV watching attempts, and before long, Jason realized that he would actually describe himself as comfortable.

The comfort wouldn’t last forever, he knew, and Leslie had emphasized repeatedly that recovery would be challenging, requiring several months with the brace as he worked towards slowly bending his knee and weightbearing followed by months more of therapy to regain his strength and flexibility. It would be more difficult than his prior recoveries, more time-consuming, more painful.

This time, though, he was doing it on his terms. He could control who entered and left the apartment, who he chose for a therapist, who among his family he could use for support. Because he would have their support, and to his surprise, he found he didn’t mind as much as he expected. He glanced at Damian’s enraptured face and listened to Tim as he muttered the lines half-a-second too early.

It would be difficult, but maybe—just maybe—it could be easier than before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you all enjoyed the second half!


End file.
